The secret, essential genius of Weird Al

Truly, these are the Weird-Al-iest of times. Now, it would take some kind of rhetorical gymnastics and cherry-picking to claim that Weird Al had a serious hand in creating our current age of pop culture engagement, but it certainly seems like this is the most fertile territory for Al’s particular style of humour since “Eat It” became an MTV staple.

The poodle-topped parodist has been on the periphery of pop culture for 30 years, but now he seems something like a godfather, not just for the simple act of replacing the words of hit pop songs — although, man, who would have called that as one of humanity’s primary modes of expression once the means of production got liberated — but also for the way he gleefully bends pop culture back on itself, uses it as both his subject and the means by which he comments on it. Weird Al has rewriting “MacArthur Park” to be about Steven Spielberg’s dinosaur blockbuster two full decades ago (and “Safety Dance” into “Brady Bunch” a decade before that), an odd sort of prelude to, say, running Game of Thrones through every bit of cultural ephemera we have (the 8-bit game! The ’80s TV theme song! As characters in The Simpsons, etc.).

If it wasn’t for the fact that everyone was tripping over themselves to celebrate each new video he releases this week, it would almost seem like we don’t even need Weird Al: His “Blurred Lines” parody “Word Crimes,” after all, comes a calendar year and countless other parodies after the song itself. Hell, even his “Fancy” and “Happy” take-offs, only a couple months after those songs hit the top of charts, seem like they’re barely squeaking in under the wire. And the fact that Al is so resolutely nice about them, is not taking an ounce of piss out of their eminently mockable singers or subjects but is basically just making sonic puns for stuff about grammar and bad shirts, seems downright out of step with the booming pop culture parody industry.

This basic decency has kind of always been part of Weird Al’s appeal, though, a genially harmless but fully committed wackiness that kept him at arm’s length, but still firmly in the grip of mainstream attention. Strange as it might seem now, humour and music have not always been close friends, at least not on a broad scale. There have certainly been a handful of often bitterly funny songwriters — the ’70s had a real boom with Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman and Warren Zevon, and the ’90s did pretty well with Ween, Beck and Primus — but the mere fact that they use humour has tended to keep them on the edges: In the music we hold most dear, straight-faced sincerity is what’s precious, to the point where depth of feeling is sometimes a stand-in for quality. And that’s generally true whether you’re getting your favourite songs from Top 40 radio or punk cassettes, hip-hop mix tapes or twangy country ballads.

But there always seems to be something going behind the joke, some tiny bit of resonance between original and parody that goes beyond simple recognition

Weird Al managed to circumvent that partly by being so openly goofy and partly by being so openly pleasant: It’s a point of pride with him that he always gets the explicit permission of his targets (barely even targets: collaborators, really), and the blessing of Michael Jackson (he used the original sets from the “Bad” video) and Nirvana (they all laughed at “Smells Like Nirvana” and Chamillionaire (he thinks he’s a great rapper) make it okay that he’s mocking that song that defined your teen years, makes him your clowning little brother rather than the snarky dick judging your record collection. It’s all in good fun; Kurt Cobain says so.

As necessary as that goofiness was to Weird Al’s impressive longevity, though, it also kind of hides a very particular kind of genius, namely for spotting undercurrents and blowing them up. “Fat,” his parody of Jackson’s “Bad,” is, yes, a fat joke, but what it really nails is the ridiculousness of a highly manicured former child star whose voice has not yet dropped squealing about being a street thug. “Smells Like Nirvana” squeezes every drop of irony out of the concept of a slacker anthem. “White & Nerdy” (and its ahead-of-the-zeitgeist counterpart, “All About the Pentiums”) finds the common ground between the sneering arrogance of nerdery and hip-hop’s boastful confidence.

The word-flipping songs get most of the attention, but this is even more apparent in Weird Al’s “style parodies,” more generic takes that, almost to a song, lay bare some of the minor-key ridiculousness of band’s entire personas. Weird Al’s two best songs are probably “Bob,” a Bob Dylan parody that finds the same kind of inscrutable depth in a series of non-sequitur palindromes, and “Dare to be Stupid,” a Devo parody built almost entirely out of flipped bits of folk wisdom and corporate slogans. Dylan and Devo are two of the most intellectually rigorous bands of the last half-century, and Weird Al takes them apart in a way no review or book-length essay ever could.

This is really why Weird Al can still separate himself from an infinite number of YouTube parodies. His connections aren’t necessarily earth-shattering or anything, but there always seems to be something going behind the joke, some tiny bit of resonance between original and parody that goes beyond simple recognition. There’s a link between being tacky and being so satisfied you have to sing about it, between being the kind of penis who hits on attached girls on the dance floor and being the kind of ignoramus who resolutely refuses to play by grammar rules. It’s why even in the Weird-Al-iest of times, there’s still only one Weird Al.

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